Modelling the dynamics of the students’ academic performance in the German region of the North Rhine-Westphalia: an epidemiological approach with uncertainty

Abstract

Student academic underachievement is a concern of paramount importance in Europe, where around 15% of the students in the last high school courses do not achieve the minimum knowledge academic requirement. In this paper, we propose a model based on a system of differential equations to study the dynamics of the students’ academic performance in the German region of the North Rhine-Westphalia. This approach is supported by the idea that both good and bad study habits, are a mixture of personal decisions and influence of classmates. This model allows us to forecast the student academic performance by means of confidence intervals over the next few years.

Keywords:

• student academic performance
• modelling
• non-linear system of differential equations
• forecasting in social sciences
• bootstrap confidence intervals

2010 AMS Subject Classifications:

• 34K60
• 62F40
• 91D10
• 93A30
• 97M10

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness grant MTM2009-08587 and Universitat Politècnica de València grant PAID06-11-2070.